Forms of Knowledge: A Psychoanalytic Study of Human Communication Book

Anna Aragno takes aim at the big questions in psychoanalysis. In her own words, she provides a "way of mapping out the formulation and exposition of a semantic of significant forms with meaning neither tied to nor one with language" Thus she accounts for the many avenues enabling comprehension that have evaded prior description. -Theodor Shapiro MD., Sept. 2004 This is the first comprehensive work emerging from psychoanalysis that correlates with a contemporary "information" paradigm or "inter-penetrative" world view. As such, it examines interrelationships between forms of communication and the development of "mind" and conscious awareness, claiming that these phenomena have always been processes integral to psychoanalytic methodology. Psychoanalytic discourse situations become research venues for a metatheoretical study of communication that takes a bio-semiotic approach to examining emergent forms of pre-semiotic and linguistic interactions while presenting a six-stage developmental model of unconscious and conscious modes of communication. The now vastly expanded interpretive purview of the psychoanalytic semantic thereby becomes an empirical window into the evolution, development, and transformative integration of the human psyche as it is molded through a specialized dialogue. By focusing on the forms of interaction themselves, rather than the interlocutors, the study lifts the locus of observation out of both relational and classical positions and into a developmental/evolutionary framework, providing overarching principles for theory and practice in a unified psychoanalytic metapsychology.